Death/Immortality

What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.

-- Dave Barry

He who dies a thousand deaths meets the final hour with the calmness of one who approaches a well remembered door.

-- Heywood Brown

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.

-- Buddha

Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds.

-- Buddha

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

-- Epicurus

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

-- Susan Ertz

Beginning in February 1976 your assistance benefits will be discontinued ... Reason: it has been reported to our office that you expired on January 1, 1976.

-- excerpt from a letter, Illinois Department of Public Aid

I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.

-- Nathan Hale

He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.

-- J. Heller

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me; give me liberty or give me death!

-- Patrick Henry

We were born to die and we die to live. As seedlings of God, we barely blossom on earth; we fully flower in heaven.

-- Russell M. Nelson, LDS Church News, April 1992 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

I am become death, shatterer of worlds.

-- Robert J. Oppenheimer, citing from the Bhagavadgita, after witnessing the world's first nuclear explosion

How could they tell?

-- Dorothy Parker, upon hearing that President Coolidge had died

There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for.

-- Tom Robbins

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

-- George Santayana

I want to die in my sleep like my friend.... Not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.

-- Seen on a bumper sticker

Everything is drive-through. In California, they even have a burial service called Jump-In-The-Box.

-- Wil Shriner

Early to rise and early to bed.
Makes a male healthy, wealthy and dead.

-- James Thurber

I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street.

-- Virginia Woolf

It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

-- Emiliano Zapata

Art

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

-- Al Capp

When Michelangelo finished the painting of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, he spent the rest of his life trying to remove the paint that had poured into his sleeve.

-- Francois Cavanna

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

-- G. K. Chesterton

If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush...

-- Dawn French

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

-- Pablo Picasso

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.

-- Francois-Auguste Rodin, when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues

See what will happen if you don't stop biting your fingernails?

-- Will Rogers, to his niece on seeing the Venus de Milo

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

-- Tom Stoppard

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

-- Oscar Wilde

Virtue/Decadence

The good people sleep much better at night than the bad people. Of course, the bad people enjoy the waking hours much more.

-- Woody Allen

My good intentions are completely lethal.

-- Margaret Atwood

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

-- James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, 1961

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.

-- G. K. Chesterton

Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.

-- François de La Rouchefoucauld, Maxims, 1665

I prefer the wicked rather than the foolish. The wicked sometimes rest.

-- Alexandre Dumas pere

If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.

-- Elbert Hubbard

I hate mankind, for I think myself to be one of them, and I know how bad I am.

-- Samuel Johnson

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

-- Abraham Lincoln

The unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.

-- H. L. Mencken

There is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is managed by order, method, and discipline.

-- Michel de Montaigne

The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling.

-- Paula Poundstone

I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.

-- Mae West

Whenever I'm caught between two evils, I take the one I've never tried.

-- Mae West

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.

-- Oscar Wilde

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

-- Oscar Wilde

It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are either charming or tedious.

-- Oscar Wilde

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

-- Oscar Wilde

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

-- Virginia Woolf

Advice

Count your age with friends but not with years.

-- Anonymous

Don't anthropomorphize computers -- they hate it.

-- Anonymous

Don't trust anyone over 30 who used to say "Don't trust anyone over 30."

-- Anonymous

Give her two red roses, each with a note. The first note says "For the woman I love" and the second, "For my best friend."

-- Anonymous

Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.

-- Anonymous

Never practice two vices at once.

-- Tallulah Bankhead

Never moon a werewolf.

-- Mike Binder

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

-- Niels Bohr

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

-- Erma Bombeck

Always behave like a duck--keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath.

-- Jacob Braude

If someone offers you a breath mint, accept it.

-- H. Jackson Brown, Jr., Life's Little Treasure Book, on wisdom

Let the refining and improving of your own life keep you so busy that you have little time to criticize others.

-- H. Jackson Brown

You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world's happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime.

-- Dale Carnegie

Never go to bed angry. Stay up and fight.

-- Phyllis Diller

Never judge a book by its movie.

-- J. W. Eagan

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

-- Albert Einstein

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

-- William Faulkner

Never be possessive. If a female friend lets on that she is going out with another man, be kind and understanding. If she says she would like to go out with the Dallas Cowboys, including the coaching staff, the same rule applies. Tell her: "Kath, you just go right ahead and do what you feel is right." Unless you actually care for her, in which case you must see to it that she has no male contact whatsoever.

-- Bruce Jay Friedman

A Code of Honor: Never approach a friend's girlfriend or wife with mischief as your goal. There are just too many women in the world to justify that sort of dishonorable behavior. Unless she's really_ attractive.

-- Bruce Friedman

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

-- Robert Frost

You can't shake hands with a clenched fist.

-- Indira Gandhi

Always go to the bathroom when you have a chance.

-- King George V

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A good time to keep your mouth shut is when you're in deep water.

-- Sidney Goff

Beware of men on airplanes. The minute a man reaches thirty thousand feet, he immediately becomes consumed by distasteful sexual fantasies which involve doing uncomfortable things in those tiny toilets. These men should not be encouraged, their fantasies are sadly low-rent and unimaginative. Affect an aloof, cool demeanor as soon as any man tries to draw you out. Unless, of course, he's the pilot.

-- Cynthia Heimel

Never judge someone by who he's in love with; judge him by his friends. People fall in love with the most appalling people. Take a cool, appraising glance at his pals.

-- Cynthia Heimel

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.

-- Cynthia Heimel, "Lower Manhattan Survival Tactics" in Village Voice

Dew knot trussed yore spell chequer two fined awl yore mistakes.

-- Brendan Hills

Live truth instead of professing it.

-- Elbert Hubbard

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

-- Indian proverb

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

-- John F. Kennedy

When you are right, you cannot be too radical; When you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

I will try to follow the advice that a university president once gave a prospective commencement speaker. "Think of yourself as the body at an Irish wake" he said. "They need you in order to have the party, but no one expects you to say very much."

-- Anthony Lake, national security advisor, at University of Massachusettes, Amhurst, Graduation 1995

For best results: wash in cold water separately, hang dry and iron with warm iron. For not so good results: drag behind car through puddles, blow-dry on roofrack.

-- Laundry instructions on a shirt made by HEET (Korea)

For the love of God, folks, don't do this at home.

-- David Letterman, CBS Late Show, demonstrating the Donut-o-pult, 1995

You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.

-- Mother Teresa

Give the people not hell, but hope and courage.

-- John Murray

Never be unfaithful to a lover, except with your wife.

-- P. J. O'Rourke

Don't look back -- something might be gaining on you.

-- Satchel Paige

Trust, but verify.

-- Ronald Reagan

It may be that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong -- but that is the way to bet.

-- Damon Runyan

We have to keep trying things we're not sure we can pull off. If we just do the things we know we can do... you don't grow as much. You gotta take those chances on making those big mistakes.

-- Cybill Shepherd

Start slow and taper off.

-- Walt Stack, marathon runner

If you can't convince them, confuse them.

-- Harry S. Truman

Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

-- Mark Twain

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

-- Mark Twain

Change before you have to.

-- Jack Welch

Attitudes

Jealousy is the only vice that gives no pleasure.

-- Anonymous

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.

-- Josh Billings

When people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.

-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

-- James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion

Whoever is not a misanthrope at forty can never have loved mankind.

-- Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort

The optimist sees opportunity in every danger; the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity.

-- Winston Churchill

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.

-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

-- Thomas Dewar

Trust everybody, but cut the cards.

-- Finley Peter Dunne

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteeen.

-- Albert Einstein

I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.

-- W. C. Fields

Love me or hate me, but spare me your indifference.

-- Libbie Fudim

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.

-- John Galsworthy

Success is just a matter of attitude.

-- Darcy E. Gibbons

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.

-- Andre Gide

Prejudice is the child of ignorance.

-- William Hazlitt

When you're away, I'm restless, lonely
Wretched, bored, dejected; only
here's the rub, my darling dear,
I feel the same when you are here.

-- Samuel Hoffenstein

A grouch escapes so many little annoyances that it almost pays to be one.

-- Kin Hubbard

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

-- William James

You must first have a lot of patience to learn to have patience.

-- Stanislaw J. Lec

Let go of your attachment to being right, and suddenly your mind is more open. You're able to benefit from the unique viewpoints of others, without being crippled by your own judgment.

-- Ralph Marston

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

-- H. L. Mencken

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

-- Vladimir Nabokov

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.

-- Proverbs 23:7

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

-- Tom Robbins

We can say 'Peace on Earth,' we can sing about it, preach about it or pray about it, but if we have not internalized the mythology to make it happen inside us, then it will not be.

-- Betty Shabazz

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

-- George Bernard Shaw

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

-- Thomas Szasz

Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.

-- Margaret Thatcher

You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses.

-- Ziggy, character in comic strip by Tom Wilson

Communication

Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us; but simplicity and straight forwardness are. Write much as you would speak; speak as you think. If with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual; if with your superiors, no finer. Be what you say; and, within the rules of prudence, say what you are.

-- Alford

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.

-- Anonymous

The only weapon that becomes sharper with constant use is the tongue.

-- Anonymous

There's nothing wrong with having nothing to say -- unless you insist on saying it.

-- Anonymous

The best time to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust.

-- Josh Billings

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.

-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

I have noticed that nothing I have never said ever did me any harm.

-- Calvin Coolidge

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

-- Gandhi

Silence is argument carried out by other means.

-- Ernesto "Che" Guevara

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

-- Ernest Hemingway

The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.

-- Kin Hubbard

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of a great sculpture.

-- Aldous Huxley

I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up.

-- Tom Lehrer

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.

-- Mignon McLaughlin

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

-- John Stuart Mill

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

-- John Stuart Mill

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.

-- Mother Teresa

It was the greatest of the imperfect ventriloquist acts: when his lips moved, her body sang.

-- Tom Robbins

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

-- George Bernard Shaw

He had occasional flashes of silence that made his conversation perfectly delightful.

-- Sydney Smith, referring to Macaulay

If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible.

-- James McNeill Whistler

Conversation, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.

-- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Creativity/Ideas

If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.

-- Hal Abelson

Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

-- Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

-- Howard Aiken

Most people are more comfortable with old problems than with new solutions.

-- Anonymous

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow.

-- Charles Brower

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

-- John Cage

If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there and worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the loss of sleep.

-- Dale Carnegie

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

-- Albert Einstein

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

-- Albert Einstein

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

There's a saying among prospectors: "Go out looking for one thing, and that's all you'll ever find."

-- Robert Flaherty

To die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture.

-- Anatole France

When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

-- Anatole France

Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

-- Gerald Holton

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world; and that is an idea whose time has come.

-- Victor Hugo

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.

-- Isaac Newton

If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.

-- George S. Patton, Jr.

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers.

-- William Penn

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not a poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

-- Will Rogers

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

-- Bertrand Russell

The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.

-- Publilius Syrus

Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else does and thinking something different.

-- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

-- Mark Twain

Desire

The grass may be greener on the other side of the fence, but you still have to mow it.

-- Anonymous

I had ambition, by which sin

The angels fell;

I climbed, and step by step, oh Lord,

Ascended into Hell

-- W. H. Davies, Ambition

Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire.

-- Jean de La Fontaine

What we anticipate seldom occurs: but what we least expect generally happens.

-- Benjamin Disraeli

I just need enough to tide me over until I need more.

-- Bill Hoest

People may or may not say what they mean ... but they always say something designed to get what they want.

-- David Mamet

He who awaits much can expect little.

-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

-- Michel de Montaigne

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.

-- P. J. O'Rourke

We never reflect how pleasant it is to ask for nothing.

-- Seneca

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

-- Oscar Wilde

Education

When I give a lecture, I accept that people look at their watches, but what I do not tolerate is when they look at it and raise it to their ear to find out if it stopped.

-- Marcel Achard

Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates...

-- Anonymous

Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.

-- Francis Bacon

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a losttradition.

-- Jacques Barzun

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

-- Hector Louis Berlioz

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.

-- Alec Bourne, A Doctor's Creed

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

-- J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.

-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.

-- Albert Camus

A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.

-- Thomas Carruthers

Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.

-- Chinese Proverb

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.

-- John Ciardi

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

-- Cicero

The wit of a graduate student is like champagne. Canadian champagne.

-- Robertson Davies

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

-- Benjamin Disraeli

The average Ph.D thesis is nothing but the transference of bones from one graveyard to another.

-- Frank J. Dobie, A Texan in England, 1945

Education is the state-controlled manufacture of echoes.

-- Norman Douglas

How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.

-- Alexandre Dumas fils

If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others.

-- Tryon Edwards

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

-- Albert Einstein

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

-- Anatole France

You are educated when you have the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence.

-- Robert Frost

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.

-- Gail Godwin

The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth which it prevents you from achieving.

-- Russell Green

I have a daughter who goes to SMU. She could've gone to UCLA here in California, but it's one more letter she'd have to remember.

-- Shecky Greene

Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. [...] The average American (should be) content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.

-- William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.

-- Aldous Huxley

Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.

-- Robert G. Ingersoll, (seen attributed to "R.S. Ingersoll" - a typo?)

If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied harder.

-- Pope John Paul I

To teach is to learn twice.

-- Joseph Joubert

An understanding heart is everything is a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

-- Carl Gustav Jung

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

-- Henry Kissinger

Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.

-- Bob Perelman

A university professor set an examination question in which he asked what is the difference between ignorance and apathy. The professor had to give an A+ to a student who answered: I don't know and I don't care.

-- Richard Pratt, Pacific Computer Weekly, 20 July 1990

Grad school is the snooze button on the clock-radio of life.

-- John Rogers, comedian (who holds a graduate degree in physics)

It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather that the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.

-- Bertrand Russell

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

-- George Bernard Shaw

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

-- B.F. Skinner

The philosophy exam was a piece of cake -- which was a bit of a surprise, actually, because I was expecting some questions on a sheet of paper.

-- Smith & Jones

I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.

-- Socrates

Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

-- G. M. Trevelyan

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

-- Mark Twain

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains.The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

-- William Arthur Ward

If your professor wrote it, it's as near to the truth as you ever need to get.

-- John Watson, University of Canterbury

The first duty of a lecturer: to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks, and keep on the mantlepiece forever.

-- Virginia Woolf

Egotism/Humility

People say "I want peace." If you remove I {ego}, and your want {desire}, you are left with peace.

-- Satya Sai Baba

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

-- Benjamin Disraeli

Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.

-- Margaret Halsey

If you are all wrapped up in yourself, you are overdressed

-- Kate Halverson

The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people.

-- Lucille S. Harper

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

-- Carl Gustav Jung

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

-- H. L. Mencken

You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.

-- Olin Miller

I would have made a good Pope.

-- Richard Nixon, U.S. President

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

-- Colin Powell

When one find's oneself in a hole of one's own making, it is a good time to examine the quality of the workmanship.

-- John Renmerde

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

-- Bertrand Russell

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

-- Schopenhauer

The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.

-- George Bernard Shaw

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

-- Oscar Wilde

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

-- Oscar Wilde

We had a lot in common. I loved him and he loved him.

-- Shelley Winters

Food/Dieting

Whenever you eliminate the inedible, whatever remains, however unpalatable, must be food.

-- Anonymous

I have a great diet. You're allowed to eat anything you want, but you must eat it with naked fat people.

-- Ed Bluestone

I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm President of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli.

-- George Bush, U.S. president, 1990

Since Eve ate the apple, much depends on dinner.

-- Lord Byron

Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.

-- John Cage

I don't even butter my bread; I consider that cooking.

-- Katherine Cebrian

C is for cookie, it's good enough for me; oh cookie cookie cookie starts with C.

-- Cookie Monster, character on "Sesame Street," U.S. children's television program

I'm at the age where food has taken the place of sex in my life. In fact, I've just had a mirror put over my kitchen table.

-- Rodney Dangerfield

The second day of a diet is always easier than the first. By the second day you're off it.

-- Jackie Gleason

My mother's menu consisted of two choices: Take it or leave it.

-- Buddy Hackett

He who does not mind his belly will hardly will hardly mind anything else.

-- Samuel Johnson

Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same reactions in the brain as marijuana...The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two, but can't remember what they are.

-- Matt Lauer, on NBC's "Today" show, August 22, 1996

I went into a McDonald's yesterday and said, "I'd like some fries." The girl at the counter said, "Would you like some fries with that?"

-- Jay Leno

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

-- Groucho Marx

Never eat more than you can lift.

-- Miss Piggy, character on "The Muppet Show," U.S. television show

The west wasn't won on salad.

-- ND Beef Council, billboard advertisement, 1990

I couldn't remember when I had been so disappointed. Except perhaps the time I found out that M&Ms really do melt in your hand...

-- Peter Oakley

No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after eating one peanut.

-- Channing Pollack

Most turkeys taste better the day after; my mother's tasted better the day before.

-- Rita Rudner

A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness.

-- Elsa Schiapirelli

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

-- George Bernard Shaw

Health food makes me sick.

-- Calvin Trillin

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for 30 years she served nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

-- Calvin Trillin

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

-- Virginia Woolf

Friendship

Some birds aren't meant to be caged, their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up, does rejoice. I guess I just miss my friend.

, Shawshank Redemption

My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.

-- Richard Adams, Watership Down

It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.

-- Arnold Bennett

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.

-- Samuel Butler

A friend is one who knows us, but loves us anyway.

-- Fr. Jerome Cummings

It destroys one's nerves to be amiable everyday to the same human being.

-- Benjamin Disraeli

I hate it in friends when they come too late to help.

-- Euripides

There are three great friends: an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.

-- Benjamin Franklin

When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.

-- E. W. Howe

Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.

-- Thomas Jones

The real test of friendship is: Can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy together those moments of life that are utterly simple? They are the moments people looks back on at the end of life and number as their most sacred experiences.

-- Eugene Kennedy

The better part of one's life consists of his friendships.

-- Abraham Lincoln

The imaginary friends I had as a kid dropped me because their friends thought I didn't exist.

-- Aaron Machado

When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat.

-- Henry Miller

A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate now knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

-- Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen.

-- Samuel Paterson

Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things: and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is.

-- George Santayana

Good friends are good for your health.

-- Irwin Sarason

Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.

-- Sydney Smith

A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.

-- Walter Winchell

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

-- Virginia Woolf, Bernard, in The Waves, 1931; repr. 1943, p. 189

Language

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.

-- Tom Robbins

Does anal retentive have a hyphen?

-- Seen on a t-shirt

Icky icky icky icky fKANG zoop-boing n zowzyin...

-- The Knights who so recently said "Nee!", Monty Python, British comedy television show

There is nothing that can be said by mathematical symbols and relations which cannot also be said by words. The converse, however, is false. Much that can be and is said by words cannot successfully be put into equations, because it is nonsense.

-- C. Truesdell

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

-- Mark Twain

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.

-- Hermann Weyl

For I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me.

-- Winnie the Pooh, character from author A. A. Milne

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

What's another word for "Thesaurus?"

-- Steven Wright

Music

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

-- Johann Sebastian Bach

Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.

-- Samuel Butler

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

-- G. K. Chesterton

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

-- George Clemenceau

Music is the art of thinking with sounds.

-- Jules Combarieu

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No."

-- Aaron Copland

We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.

-- Decca Recording Company, rejecting the Beatles, 1962

This compact disc is made from analog masters recorded without noise reduction. Half the tracks, in fact, were recorded in a dismal, cheap basement eight-track studio with puddles of water on the floor. Digital technology will now faithfully reproduce these noisy, low-fi, un-professional masters at great expense. feel stupid yet?

-- Disclaimer on a CD

Hell is a half-filled auditorium.

-- Robert Frost

Cute little babies that fall out of swings - These are a few of my favourite things.

-- Oscar Hammerstein, working lyric for a piece from "The Sound of Music"

If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing badly.

-- Gustav Holst, on amateur music-making

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

-- Aldous Huxley

2,400,000 Americans play the accordian - hopefully not at the same time.

-- inside of a Pepsi cap

Opera in English is, in the main, about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

-- H. L. Mencken

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

-- Michel de Montaigne

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

-- Elvis Presley

Propel, propel, propel your craft softly down liquid solution. Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, Existence is simply illusion.

-- Fred Rogers, parody of "Row, row, row your boat" on his television show, "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."

There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.

-- George Bernard Shaw

Never look at the trombones. You'll only encourage them.

-- Richard Strauss, on conducting

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

-- Igor Stravinsky

"These are days you'll remember." If you recall nothing else from your graduation ceremony, remember you heard the New Jersey Governor quote from 10,000 Maniacs.

-- Christine Todd, NJ Governor, Wheaton College Graduation, 1995

Assassins!

-- Arturo Toscanini, to his orchestra

Anything too stupid to be said, is sung.

-- Voltaire

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

-- Oscar Wilde

Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.

-- Oscar Wilde

Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.

-- Frank Zappa

Virtue/Decadence

The good people sleep much better at night than the bad people. Of course, the bad people enjoy the waking hours much more.

-- Woody Allen

My good intentions are completely lethal.

-- Margaret Atwood

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

-- James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, 1961

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.

-- G. K. Chesterton

Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.

-- François de La Rouchefoucauld, Maxims, 1665

I prefer the wicked rather than the foolish. The wicked sometimes rest.

-- Alexandre Dumas pere

If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.

-- Elbert Hubbard

I hate mankind, for I think myself to be one of them, and I know how bad I am.

-- Samuel Johnson

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

-- Abraham Lincoln

The unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.

-- H. L. Mencken

There is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is managed by order, method, and discipline.

-- Michel de Montaigne

The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling.

-- Paula Poundstone

I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.

-- Mae West

Whenever I'm caught between two evils, I take the one I've never tried.

-- Mae West

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.

-- Oscar Wilde

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

-- Oscar Wilde

It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are either charming or tedious.

-- Oscar Wilde

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

-- Oscar Wilde

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

-- Virginia Woolf

Writing/Reading

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.

-- Kingsley Amis

The covers of this book are too far apart.

-- Ambrose Bierce

NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue.

-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Beneath the rule of men entirely great, / The pen is mightier than the sword.

-- Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu, II. ii

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

-- G. K. Chesterton

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

-- G. K. Chesterton

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

-- Tom Clancy

More than kisses, letters mingle souls.

-- John Donne

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

-- T. S. Eliot

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.

-- English Professor, Ohio University

I have read your book and much like it.

-- Moses Hadas, book reviewer

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it.

-- Moses Hadas, book reviewer

This book fills a much-needed gap.

-- Moses Hadas, book reviewer

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

-- Oliver Herford

Why don't you write books people can read?

-- Nora Joyce, to her husband James

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business.

-- Abraham Lincoln

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

-- Groucho Marx

In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.

-- André Maurois

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

-- H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare

Author: A fool, who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting the generations to come.

-- Montesquieu

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

-- Flannery O'Connor

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

-- Flannery O'Connor

This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but hurled with great force.

-- Dorothy Parker

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.

-- Jean Jacques Rousseau

Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.

-- Alvin Toffler

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

-- Mark Twain

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

-- Mark Twain

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

-- Mark Twain

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

-- Paul Valery

Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

-- Frank L. Visco, How to Write Good

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

-- E. B. White

Biography lends to death a new terror.

-- Oscar Wilde

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

-- Oscar Wilde

I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me.

-- Winnie the Pooh, character created by author A. A. Milne

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

-- Virginia Woolf

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this pictorial account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping.

-- Ed Zern, Field and Stream, November 1959